AustLit

'Who was Iris Webber? For Fiona Kelly McGregor, the search began at an exhibition where Webber’s gaol mugshot first caught McGregor’s eye. In her 2017 creative writing exegesis, McGregor writes about becoming ‘vexed’ by ‘static, tabloid’ portraits of Webber—gun-slinging, sly-grogging, lesbian gangster of the author’s hometown—who earned the epithet ‘the most violent woman in Sydney’. The academic work examines the many biases that accompany representations of Webber, wrestling the historically contentious figure from the clichéd narratives and hackneyed tropes of contemporary reportage that have been repeated through the years. It throws open a window into McGregor’s motivations and ambitions for her novel Iris to ‘be read as both myth and document’. '  (Introduction)

'Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gives Paul Dalgarno’s second novel its title, weaving through the narrative as an allegory for sparking life, a filament of memory and imagination. A Country of Eternal Light follows Dalgarno’s 2020 debut novel, Poly, an adventure in kitchen-table polyamory, and his 2015 memoir, And You May Find Yourself. This year also sees the release of his second non-fiction book, Prudish Nation.' (Introduction)   

'Genre fiction has long been snubbed as inferior to serious literary fiction in Australia. This seems to be shifting, at least incrementally. Romance fiction – which sells like hot cakes – now makes the occasional appearance on writers festival programs, while experimental novels by authors Jennifer Mills, Jane Rawson, Michael Winkler, Robbie Arnott and Laura Jean McKay have made the cut on recent Miles Franklin award long and short lists.' (Introduction)

'September 2020. Melbourne is strangely quiet, streets nearly deserted. We are suspended in lockdown. All the libraries are closed. Parcels of new books stack up inside; the usual whirr of air conditioning and photocopiers is silent. The spaces normally packed with students, the elderly, readers, children and city workers sit empty. The book-return chutes are closed, overdue fines have been waived. Library staff are working from home or have been redeployed to other jobs. Librarians are a resourceful bunch; they have adapted to lockdown by moving children’s story-time sessions and English-language classes online. Library budgets have been shuffled to buy more ebooks, films and streaming audio content to answer the exponential surge in demand. Books have been posted out to eager readers stuck at home.' (Introduction)

'Sofie Laguna has established herself as a writer who renders the world in vivid detail through the eyes of children. She skilfully shows how childhood can be punctured by brutality: the first-person protagonists of her two previous novels are betrayed by the adults who should protect them. Jimmy, the narrator of her Miles Franklin award-winning novel, The Eye of the Sheep, is autistic, and his struggles to understand the adult world are exacerbated by domestic violence. In Laguna’s next book, The Choke, Justine is in danger, surrounded by male aggression and menace. Both children are buffeted by chaos, failed by their families, and abandoned to navigate life in the aftermath of trauma.' (Introduction)

'Novelist and short-story writer Tegan Bennett Daylight’s first nonfiction collection, The Details, is a book about paying attention: to words in books; to life’s patterns and paradoxes. The author credits her mother, a voracious reader, with teaching her to notice details: “When I read, I am still in conversation with her.” This reading lineage is passed down from Daylight to her own children.' (Introduction)

'British nature writer Robert Macfarlane describes desire lines as “paths and tracks made over time by the wishes and feet of walkers … contrary to design or planning”. Felicity Volk’s second novel traces such a contrary path in the unconventional love story of Evie Waddell and Paddy O’Connor: theirs is a grand passion that winds its heady course across continents over five turbulent decades.' (Introduction)

'Wayne Marshall’s debut collection of short stories is a book that can be wholly judged by its cover. On it, a burly bloke embraces a kangaroo who wears a Carlton footy vest – a queer romantic scene that is backlit by the gentle glow of a telly. Marshall’s schtick is injecting Australian tropes with fabulist twists: everything is not what it first seems.' (Introduction)

'Anna Krien is highly regarded for her deeply researched and incisive long-form journalism. Her books Night Games and Into the Woods, along with two Quarterly Essays, have cemented her as one of this country’s leading voices on contemporary sociopolitical and environmental issues, and an advocate for fairness and reason.' (Introduction)

'Bangladeshi Australian author Samia Khatun’s Australianama is a book of books, a survey of divergent modes of historical storytelling, and a search for truth in the face of cultural erasure. It opens with Khatun visiting her mother, Eshrat, in a mental health ward in Sydney’s suburbs. Plagued with terrifying visions in Bengali, Eshrat is locked each night in a shared room with a uniformed Australian soldier – recently returned from Afghanistan – who she believes will murder her in her sleep. With the hospital refusing to relocate her mother, Khatun comprehends an irresolvable dissonance: “Western states cannot bomb, exploit, drone, invade and kill South Asians andhave us as part of their citizenry at the same time.” She laments, “The migrant story I had inhabited for much of my life buckled, and eventually collapsed.” This acts as the catalyst for Khatun’s expansive history of the South Asian diaspora in colonial Australia.' (Introduction)

'In her work as a performance artist, Fiona McGregor is no stranger to physical and psychological endurance, often sitting uncomfortably still for hours on end. However, it is the more challenging act of endurance – writing a novel – that she documents in this photo essay, A Novel Idea. In the epilogue, McGregor laments that novel writing “is mystified, romanticised or, conversely, trivialised”. She says, “Let this document then show how banal, gruelling and lonely it really is.” And so she does.' (Introduction)

'That first night, he reached up into the winter dark. His hand drifted past Sirius, flashing like a huge diamond, a star without equal. He selected Aldebaran and plucked it straight out of the sky. It was effortless the way he pinched the star between his thumb and forefinger, brought it down to Earth and held it dazzling in his palm. The starlight beamed bright between the gaps in his fingers, making us squint as it refracted off the knit of quartz and feldspar in the western granite mountain range. We stood in awe of its beauty. But what to do with a star pilfered from the night sky?'  (Introduction)